Here are a few highlights from the salesforce.com and Oracle announcement.

"By Larry and I coming together, a door has opened that lets us go through into the future." - Marc Benioff

"So, we're very proud about this new partnership with salesforce.com. And personally, I'm looking forward to working with Marc and Salesforce for years to come to tackle some of these exciting challenges and help the future arrive a little bit sooner than it otherwise would." – Larry Ellison

"An awful lot of our customers run Salesforce." – Larry Ellison

"You've got to be able to turn on the Salesforce CRM applications, the Oracle HCM or ERP applications. And those things just have to start sharing data and working together - the key word being seamlessly . . . I think that's what Salesforce customers have come to expect, and that's what Marc and I are committed to working on." – Larry Ellison

Listen and download a full transcript of the media and analyst call hosted by Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff.

"It's a super-big win for us," said Dave Hansen, CEO of security vendor SafeNet, which uses Salesforce.com CRM and Oracle for financials. Salesforce.com "is by far the leader" in CRM and is probably never going to move deeply into financials, where Oracle is especially strong, Hansen added.